The name Mark Renner has been on the lips of the Baltimore fringes for decades. In the early 2000s, I heard whispers of a lone wolf artist from the county who made music like Ultravox and Cocteau Twins circulating through at least one Charm City house party. Awareness of his existence was a sort of cred calling card that distinguished a true Baltimore deep head from the flocks of fashionable Maryland Institute College of Art students and surly punk-scene townies in Charles Village, Mount Royal, Remington, Hampden and other enclaves of alternative culture.
It was a fertile environment for a legend of this kind. Interpol’s neo-post-punk sound had reignited interest in Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and lesser-known bands from the crannies of British indie. Kids were rabid for shimmering guitars and driving drum machines. The savviest among them had a cassette rip of Renner’s 1986 full-length debut, All Walks of This Life, an album whose a-side of Harold Budd-esque instrumental meditations led into a b-side of glittering pop.
After purchasing a sealed copy of the LP from a record dealer at a Philadelphia flea market a few years back, RVNG Intl. label head Matt Werth understood what the Baltimore deep heads already knew: Renner’s music deserves to be mentioned alongside those 1980s UK tastemakers, and it almost certainly would have had a more visible profile had their fans gotten hold of the album in its day. Instead, Renner became a UPS driver and a humanitarian worker, traveling to Ethiopia with his church to help locals struggling with AIDS in the early 2000s. All the while, he continued to make music and art on the side. And now Werth and crew have assembled this collection of nine tracks from All Walks of This Life, along with a handful of rarities, in hopes of bringing Renner’s music to a wider public.
A committed and prolific visual artist, Renner explains in the album notes (written by Pitchfork contributor Brandon Soderberg) that he doesn’t really consider himself a musician. “My approach to recording has often been as a painter—only with sound instead of color,” he says. It’s a very Eno-type declarative. This ethos reveals itself most clearly in the instrumental pieces that comprise the bulk of this reissue, some from the 1986 LP and others culled from even lesser-known works. This mood music brings to mind acts like Cluster, whose deceptively complex arrangements, like Renner’s, permeate one’s consciousness fluidly. Renner says that these recordings were often meant as companion pieces to his paintings, and it’s unfortunate that this package doesn’t include renderings of those visual works for comparison.
That said, his unforgettable pop songwriting is the highlight of this reissue. “Half a Heart,” a jangly standout from All Walks of This Life, could have been a hit. Indeed, it was inspired by a friend who’d go on to tread in such waters. How Renner became penpals with Stuart Adamson of the Skids and Big Country in the early Eighties isn’t explained, but after about a year and a half of correspondence, he traveled to Scotland, met up with Adamson, and cut a series of demos in a London studio with his guidance, “Half a Heart” among them. Other vocal tracks, like “Saints and Sages,” “The Wild House,” and “More or Less,” also showcase Renner’s hushed baritone and poet’s lyrical sensibility. He’s musical and thoughtful, exemplary of the era and yet unique. These vocal compositions are where Renner really shines, and it’s a shame there aren’t even more of them.
Taken as a collection of songs, Few Traces is a mostly great comp showcasing an outsider’s celestial pairing of ambient and British pop influences. Only a few tracks from the ’90s, like “A Fountain in the Cloister” and “James Cowie (The Portrait Group),” stand as outliers to an otherwise fluid sequence. But as a reissue package, the lack of visual context and outside perspectives in the narrative leave something to be desired. What could Baltimore studio technician John Grant, who engineered most of Renner’s original albums, have said of the work? Or Ed Meyers, Renner’s bandmate in his early groups Boys in the River and the Favorite Game? Or Renner’s brother, whose copies of Hermann Hesse’s writing had a profound effect on the young artist? Forget music: How about a gallerist who believed in Renner’s visual artwork?
The label has provided a caveat for this release: “Few Traces collects Mark Renner’s early music but strives not to simplify or reframe it.” The aim of presenting Renner’s work in a straightforward manner is admirable, but the omission of essential context leaves the listener wanting. Despite this shortcoming, the good news is that his music now has an opportunity to transcend the limited reach of the Baltimore fringe-culture cognoscenti, through this release and via a forthcoming documentary by Baltimore resident Maia Stern. The warmth of such renewed possibility is often the sweet spot of reissue culture, what makes the hard work worth it. Three decades later, Renner’s humble dedication to his art is certainly deserving of our attention.
